LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

I III Ml 



nun 



029 827 245 3 



II Ml III 



C2 U5 The Truth 



HV 5106 

.C2 

1883 



AND 



Copy 1 

The Wine Interest ! 



/ 
Prosperity or Pauperism? 



WILL WINE MAKING PAY? 

A Question of Finance. 



Published for the Grand Lodge, I. O. G. T\, 
4 of California, 

By Capt. A. D. WOOD, 

San Francisco. 



TttTJElJD EDITION. 



SAN FRANCISCO: 

Bacon & Company, Printers. 

1883. 



to 






THE TRUTH 



AND 



THE WINK INTEREST. 



NUMBER I. 

There was a time not very long ago, when wine 
was almost universally believed to be a legitimate 
natural product of the fruits of the soil^ and a 
proper article appointed by the Creator for the use 
of man.L It was supposed to be nourishing, 
strengthening, supporting, and to possess a greater 
range and variety of medicinal properties than were 
ever claimed for Holloways Pills or E. Y. Pierce's 
quackeries. It was also believed that the Creator 
had been a little careless or indiscreet or mistaken, 
in providing us with such a useful food and such a 
cure-all medicine, that is so expensive and so dan- 
gerous, and so tempting to abuse and excess; and 
which has destroyed more human lives and souls 
and properties, and caused more sin, crime, misery 
and untimely death than war, pestilence, famine 
and all the other evils combined that have ever cur- 
sed the world. 

But there were some folks who did not believe 
the Creator ever made mistakes or surrounded men 
with snares of perdition; they subjected wine to a 
thoroly scientific inquisition. ^JThe result was the 
discovery that every pretension ever made for wine 



outside of the Bible and the writings of some 
."- heathen philosophers, was a fraud, a folly, a delus- 
ion: they found wine was an unmitigated impostor, 
a cheat, a lie, in every thing. /It was and is just 
what the Bible says; a^mocker, a disturber, a deceiv- 
er, a perverter, a biter, a stinger, a fell destroyer. 
Its claim to be nourishing, strengthening and a 
medicine was most absolutely false. Every thing 
the world had believed of it was a mistake, except 
that it was dangerous. It was found that God nev- 
er made or provided for making a particle of it;^ It 
was and is a product of rotten grapes, after every 
particle of any useful property of the grape has 
been destroyed. It is nothing but alcohol, and wa- 
ter with a flavor which is unsubstantial, and a ves- 
tige of sugar perhaps. It can be made just as 
good from rotten potatoes or apples or cactus plants 
or cabbage leaves or molasses — and water, and a 
few coloring and flavoring drugs — provided always, 
that the original vegetable article from which it is 
made, must be rotted and putrified and made to 
emit for days a nauseous and deadly poisonous gas 
and a horrible stench. 

The value put upon wine was a monstrous fraud 
too. The imitations of regular grape wine made 
from any alcoholic base at a few cents a gallon, are 
consumed all over the world by drinkers without 
suspicion, and they answer the purpose equally 
well. No one who buys French wines in or out of 
France, of the cheapest up to the most expensive 
brands, unless he has watched their manufacture, 
has the least security that they are not frauds made 
for 10 or 20 cents a gallon. No one, who drinks 



California wine away from the ranch or factory 
where grape wine is made, ' knows or can find out 
whether . it is potato or grape or cider wine.* Ev- 
erybody who drinks it is quite satisfied of one 
thing: and that is all he needs or wants to know: 
it will make drunk, and one thing is actually as 
good as another for that purpose.- There would be 
a terrible outcry made if tea and coffee merchants 
were known to sell a fabricated article for a dollar 
or two a pound, that they were manufacturing 
from old rotten rubbish at four or five cents a 
pound; but, as the scripture says, wine is a mocker 
and they that are entrapped by it are not wise. So 
one thing answers for them as well as another, if it 
has the right amount of drunk in it. 

The advocates of the manufacture and sale of 
wine are so, either because they desire to make 
money themselves by the ruin of others — or they 
have been entrapped and mocked and fooled by 
wine — or they are most deplorably and comprehen- 
sively ignorant of everything that relates to wine 
as almost every wine drinker in this country is. 

The traders in drunkenness and their tools have 
one defensive weapon, which they are very fond of 
using, because they have no other. 

They say the advocates of sobriety and honesty 
and decency lie about wine and drink, to make 
money out of it someway. Now every body with 
any sense at all knows that such a charge is utterly 
false, because we are the only people in the country 
who could sell liquor and make money by it: not 
drinking ourselves, we could gobble up all the 
money of the drinkers and hold on to it, and only 



lose our self respect and character and honesty and 
our souls: we could hold on to the fool's money to the 
last, but the liquor sellers cannot: they drink and 
go to death and ruin and perdition, at a quicker av- 
erage rate than the victims they destroy. If we 
were after money and would lie to get it, we could 
make easy fortunes in the wine business. 

The wine dealers have no motive except gain, and 
that too, dishonest gain; gain obtained at the ex- 
pense of their neighbor's life and soul and of their 
own. We have a prospective gain too, from the fi- 
nal extinction of wine; and we are proud of it. 
We expect to save 100.000 or so of lives from going 
out in darkness and in the service of satan every 
year in this country. We expect to be the helpers 
and instruments in making millions of homes and 
many millions of people happy, safe and joyous 
and prosperous thru the downfall of the devouring 
monster, who has been the merciless butcher of 
our race, the destroyer of our homes, the invader 
of our peace for centuries. We expect to see this 
now most unhappy of all States become a garden of 
innocence and peace and happiness and the worship 
of the God of our country replace the horrible or- 
gies of satan which now desolate it A And we hope 
with good reason to see every nasty deadfall that 
now destroys all honest business, replaced with at 
least five honest and enriching industries and em- 
ployments. And we hope many millions of people 
will dwell in Heaven who can never get there while 
the grogshop and the devil rule here. 

The people who want to gain money by the 
drunkenness and ruin of their neighbors tell us, 



6 

tliat making wine and brandy is an enriching busi- 
ness for the wine makers and for the State. It is 
freely admitted that if a remunerative price could 
be obtained for those drinks and they should all be 
exported and sold, and not a drop consumed in the 
State, the business would be as enriching to us here 
as any other could be, yielding the same percentage 
of advance upon cost. /That is quite clear. But 
we know its purchase and use would result in a 
dead loss to its consumers abroad, without doing 
them a particle of benefit; we know it would kill 
thousands of men, women and children, and would 
have just the same effects as its use by the Alaska 
Indians, only those effects would be a little slower 
among some of the whites. 

If we could steal a large amount of cattle and 
horses every year in Oregon and sell them in Nev- 
ada at an exorbitant profit without any risk of 
being caught and hung, we should get very 
rich all the same; but the people of Oregon and 
Nevada would be a good deal more impoverished 
than we should be enriched; and that is precisely 
what occurs with our wine and brandy customers, 
except that they are worse sufferers than people 
who only have their cattle stolen. 

Our leading papers which fish for subscribers by 
prophesying smooth things and great wealth from 
the cultivation of drunkenness in this State, are 
very fond at times of enlarging upon the mon- 
strous crime of England in forcing opium upon the 
Chinese. They have no subscribers in England or 
they would sing an entirely different song. The 
crime of England in that thing is one of the most 



wicked and cruel and sordid and utterly horrible 
ever known in the history of sin; but it is very 
much like our sending wine and brandy to China 
and Japan and England or anywhere. "^England 
dont force any body in China to buy opium a parti- 
cle more than we force Englishmen to buy brandy. 
But she does compel the Chinese Emperor and his 
advisers to abstain from prohibiting its voluntary 
purchase by the Chinese people. That is all the 
difference and it is a very trifling one. 

But the pretensions and promises and statistic a 
and arguments of the wine and brandy advocates 
are utterly fallacious and unfounded. There are 
statements made by some of them which are so 
false that they seem designedly so; some false im- 
pressions are received and promulgated thru the 
terrible fanaticism enkindled by avarice and the 
use of these poison beverages, and no doubt in 
most instances the most sublimely ridiculous and 
self -contradictory statements are made and accepted 
and believed because of the benighted ignorance 
which is so very general upon the whole subject. 

In next and following numbers these pretensions 
will be examined and their falsehood exposed. 



NUMBER II. 

There are two and only two classes of enemies to 
the grape growers; botb equally hostile to their fi- 
nancial interests and to their comfort and welfare. 
One class is the phylloxera which seeks to destroy 
their vines root and branch: the other is the wine 
and brandy sharp who proposes to blast this mag- 



8 

nificent, wholesome, worthy and profitable indus- 
try, to hoist over it -the death's head and cross- 
bones of the pirate flag, and prostitute the luscious 
clusters of the vine into a poisonous breath of hell 
for the destruction of men's lives and souls; to 
make the beautiful vineyard an instrument of dev- 
astation and beggary and death to the vine grower 
and to the victim of the poison cup. 

'"There is no use in California for either the phyl- 
loxera or the other more costly and dangerous pest. 
If we are to have either, the former should be our 
choice: it only attacks the vine: it dont attack our 
lives and our homes and our morals. It dont 
build penitentiaries and lunatic asylums and flood 
them full all the time with human wrecks. The 
other pest does. 

The vine grower has only one class of friends in 
this State to help him in this emergency, and of 
that class is the Bescus and the Order of Good 
Templars. Let us talk it over and see who are 
friends and who are enemies of the vineyard men. 

The temperance men have no £>ossible personal 
gain to derive from the vineyard men: the wine and 
brandy men expect nothing but pecuniary gain and 
have only that motive: can have no other. We pro- 
pose if possible to put a stop to the waste of your 
grapes at a cent or three-eights of a cent a pound 
which will probably soon be their price, to go into 
the rot heap and be turned into crazing, madden- 
ing, useless poison. WWe want to spoil that market 
of waste and drunkenness and shame and poverty 
if we can. But we offer you something vastly 
more profitable than that very uncertain market. 



The production of- raisins and the employment of 
the boys and girls of the vine growers, in place of 
the chinamen of the winery, can be made doubly 
or trebly profitable as compared with the drunkery 
process. I* But you say, raisins cannot be made ev- 
erywhere* "Well, green fruit can be^'raised every- 
where, and with as much energy and effort and 
State aid, expended in the development of the can- 
ned and preserved grape and grape juice, as has 
been given to the wine and brandy interest, a much 
more profitable and a perfectly safe and proper mar- 
ket can be secured for the fruit of the vine. 

With fair dealing on the part of the railroad in- 
terest in place of their present system of charging 
four or five times the lawful honest freight on fresh 
fruit delivered in the East, a market can be secured 
for 1000 tons of fresh grapes a day which should 
give the grower three times the price paid by the 
wine and brandy makers. But it is admitted that 
kind of a business wont make the distillers million- 
aires by converting the vine growers into paupers 
and peons, as may be found marked out on the tres- 
tle board of the future, by the wine men. 

There is no possible light in which the anti-bran- 
dy men can be truthfully put, except as the friends 
of the vine growers, and there is no possible light 
in which the wine and brandy makers and their 
newspaper advocates can truthfully appear, except 
as their worst and most insidious enemies, just like 
t 1 e phylloxera, but more far reaching in their pro- 
spective mischief. 

It is readily admitted that if we come to you 
with a request to let your grapes rot on the vines or 



10 

to dig up your vineyards, and engage in some less 
profitable industry, we should not expect a respect- 
ful hearing, however just and fair our case might 
be. But we commend you to safety and a future of 
prosperity and comfort. Our opponents will sure- 
ly admit, as we do, that the manufacture of wine 
and brandy will be subject to about the same condi- 
tions here, as in other countries where it has been 
tried, in proportion to the extent to whicn the busi- 
ness has been carried. 

If it has made any country richer, happier or 
more moral and honest, it is admitted, there is ev- 
ery reason to presume that the business will pro- 
duce a similar result here. If it has benefited one- 
half or one-fourth or one-tenth of the countries 
that have harbored wine and brandy manufacture, 
. it is admitted by us, that California has just that 
chance to be benefitted financially, morally and so- 
cially. And if it can be proved never to have in the 
slightest degree benefitted any country, it is fair to 
expect that it will act similarly here. If it can be 
proved that it never was anything but a destroying 
and debauching and pauperizing agency, in every 
other country,' the asseverations and oaths of a mil- 
lion brandy distillers, reprobate newspaper time 
servers and saloonkeeper s. will never make it have 
any other effect in this country; it will be shown 
that it never can nor could have any bat an evil 
and damnable tendency in every possible direction. 
XThere are two pictures offered to-day to the peo- 
ple of California. One drawn by any 'reasoning, 
commonsense observer and. reader of the world's 
history, and the other by the devotee and dupe of 



11 

the bottle and by those whom the greed of ill-got- 
ten gain has blinded. 

The picture -which the sober reasoner sees, as the 
result of a plain common sense application of 
A. B. 0. business principles to the grape culture 
question — is that of a million happy rural homes in 
this State, embowered in every beautiful embellish- 
ment of tree and flower and shrub and vine; every 
one of them fruitful in evidences of thrift and in- 
dustry and taste, comfort and culture, on the part 
of the occupants. Every one a home of virtue and 
and peace and a nursery of American good citizen- 
ship. A paradise example to all the world of the 
proper employment of God's gifts and men's reas- 
oning faculties. 

The other picture, that whose outlines have been 
cast by the agents of the great mocker and tempter 
enemy of mankind, is one of bleak desolation, ru- 
ined homes, departed peace, the inevitable, ever 
present insignia of drunkenness, vice, debauchery, 
crime, and beggary and filthiness, interspersed 
with here and there a rare exception of fortunate 
exemption from the prevailing ruin. 

The picture that shall be, will be the work of the 
grape growers themselves. They will elect to make 
their portions of the State nests of crime and igno- 
rance and drunkenness and beggary — or homes of 
virtue, peace, sobriety and their inevitable fruits, 
health, wealth and happiness. What wine and 
brandy has done, it always will, where it exists. 
What it has done and is doing elsewhere will be de- 
tailed in following chapters. 



12 



NUMBER III 



Some of the claims set up by the wine and bran- 
dy apostles are too silly and too self -evidently false 
to be noticed seriously: they are only believed by 
the hopelessly ignorant and unthinking. They say 
at one time, that the use of wine does not lead to 
drunkenness, at another, one kind of wine does, 
but the other does not: which is of course the most 
simple nonsense. Again they say that drunkenness 
is not prevalent in wine making countries, when 
they know that they have been little else than nur- 
series of drunkards, ever since the time of Noah, 
and are to-day the filthiest harlot civilizations of 
the world. They still keep rehearsing the old worn 
out folly, that the use of beer and wine or either 
diminishes the use of stronger liquors: whereas all 
experience has proved that they have the opposite 
tendency. 

It has been claimed that the pure wines of this 
State were not seductive allurements to drunken- 
ness, that they were conducive to sobriety. But 
every body who has had an opportunity of observa- 
tion, knows the utter falsehood of the claim. Even 
Mr. Wetmore, one of the chief priests of the bran- 
dy idolatry, has of late publicly declared that a 
large portion of the wines of this State in common 
use, are unfit to be used and ought to be sent to the 
distillery. And no one will deny that the distillery 
is an unmistakable drunkard factory. 

In England 50 years ago. it was deemed by the 
crazy people who drink, that drunkenness could be 



13 

supplanted by affording facilities for the sale of 
beer. Beer houses were opened everywhere to coax 
drinkers away from gin and whisky. Great results 
were expected and they came: drunkenness and de- 
bauchery were fearfully aggravated and the sale of 
the strong liquors vastly increased. Ever since, it 
has been admitted that the Beer Act ^as the most 
awful disaster that ever bef el England. But a simi- 
lar attempt was made about 25 years ago and carri- 
ed out, to cure drunkenness in England by intro- 
ducing cheap French wines, which resulted like in- 
troducing the small pox to supplant the yellow fe- 
ver, and of course drunkenness aud the use of 
strong spirits both ha/l a marked increase, as all 
sensible men had foreseen and declared. 

Every one who can and wants to see, must know 
that scores of thousands become drinkers and 
drunkards thru drinking beer and wine, who never 
would have acquired a taste, or conquered their 
natural repugnance, for strong liquors had their 
been no lighter drink to begin with. No one has 
ever seen an instance of a free drinker of strong 
liquors becoming a moderate drinker of light wine 
or beer, or if one has been such an exception, he is 
one against ten thousand who have gone the other 
way. 

But the most potent argument that falls upon the 
ear of the vineyardist, is the 

WEALTH 

To be derived from the wretched prostitution of 
the grape into brandy and fermented wine for the 
pauperization and destruction of others. Now 
there are quite a number of wine making countries 



14 

which should be brot forward as examples of the 
enriching effects of turning good grapes into pau- 
perizing drinks. First among these should be 

SPAIN. 

That country has drawn revenues enough from 
its colonies to make it a country of rich bankers. 
The people should have been rich and amazingly 
prosperous from that source alone. The mines and 
plunder from South America alone ought to have 
made Spain a country of gold and silver. Its posi- 
tion and climate and its own soil and seashore and 
mines, should have made Spain rich without any 
other resources. If wine and brandy could ever be 
enriching, Spain has made enough of them to have 
made her the Bank of Europe. But because of the 
curse of her infernal wine traffic, her people and 
her government are bankrupt and pauperized both 
physically and morally. They drink nearly all the 
wine they make, which is an utter waste of the in- 
dustry and land employed in its production. With 
every resource and opportunity for the most teem- 
ing prosperity, her 16 million people are semi-bar- 
barous — only one in 5 can read and write. About a 
million of their nobility have almost or quite de- 
generated to pauperism and a large proportion of the 
people are paupers, beggars, brigands &c with no 
redeeming qualities: the people and country exact- 
ly fill the bill of a drinking, dancing, gambling, la- 
zy, dirty, debauched and utterly contemptible 
played out nation of wine makers, and it was the 
wine makers that debauched and pauperized the 
nation.'; The wine experts dont explain to us that 
Spain has been enriched: a country that never had 



15 
any drawback but its wine and the ignorance and 
vice that has always been allied with it. Spain 
has a national debt too, as large as ours and always 
increasing, and will doubtless never pay a cent of 
it. 

POETtJGAIi ETC. 

Portugal, Italy, Hungary, Greece, Sicily are al] 
wine countries and played out. They have suppli- 
ed North and South America for a long time with 
beggars and bandits, drunken organ grinders, drunk- 
en fishermen, drunken sailors, drunken cooks, 
drunken shoe blacks and sometimes some very good 
people have come to us from Italy and perhaps 
Borne of the other countries named. ** These coun- 
tries ought and no doubt would have been wealthy 
and prosperous in a very high degree but for their 
wine. They dont seem to have ever had any other 
drawback or obstacle but wine, and the ignorance, 
vice and pauperism which God decreed should be its 
inseparable companions. Our wine apostles dont 
write fulsome eulogies in the Chronicle and Bulle- 
tin and Eecord Union, calling the world's attention 
to the lofty, moral, social, political and financial 
eminence to which wine has raised Portugal, Hun- 
gary, Spain &c. They dont quite dare to do that, 
tho they have done bolder things in that line, 
trusting to the ignorance of their readers. 

Peru is another country which has been very 
Buccessful in making excellent wine and brandy; 
with a fabulous amount and variety of resources 
from guano, nitrate, silver, copper, cotton, alpaca 
and other wools &c,'its wine and brandy, before the 
late war commenced, had pauperized the govern- 



16 

ment and the country and sunk the people to the 
lowest depths of sensuality, debasement and im- 
becility. The wine sharps dont hold up Peru as a 
wine success, but they always say 

France! prance! ! France !'! ! 

Look at what a rich country wine has made France. 
Now if they can show that wine has ever added one 
dollar to the wealth of France without impoverish- 
ing France five dollars, the Kescue will shut down 
from all further objection to the wine traffic and its 
enriching processes. But to say France is rich; 
France makes wine; therefore wine has made France 
rich, has exactly the same force as to say Messrs 
Stanford, Crocker, D. O. Mills, E. J". Baldwin, J. 
C. Flood are all rich men: they all have used wine; 
therefore, without doubt, drinking wine made 
them all rich. 

Just exactly so we can say, England makes an 
enormous amount of beer, exports a little of it; 
England is rich; therefore beer has made England 
rich. Whereas beer and drink has made an enor- 
mous proportion of that most hardy and capable 
race, hopeless paupers, and has reduced five to ten 
times as many more to a condition more unhappy 
than that of a pauper fed at the ptiblic expense. 

In next chapter the sources of the wealth and 
prosperity of France will be enquired into. 



mjMBER IV. 
FKANCE AND ITS WEALTH. 

It is proposed to look up the sources of wealth 
in France, to see how much drunkenness at home 
and the making of drunkards abroad, have contri- 
buted to that wealth. 

The French people when sober are as careful, cal- 
culating, economical in all their modes of living as 
the Chinese; and they are probably as industrious 
as any other people in the world. Economy, indus- 
try, intelligence, sobriety, morality are about the 
sum of the sources of all national wealth. The lack 
of any one of these things is a leak in the national 
finances. In the two first, France stands first in 
the world, away ahead of all the rest. In the third 
she is among the foremost, and is not much behind 
any of her neighbors in the others. There- 
fore we have a reason good and sufficient, why 
France ought to be the richest , nation of Europe 
without any help from wine and brandy. 

The French are the most intensely and practically 
patriotic people of the world. They never go out 
of France to spend a cent if they can help it. They 
never go abroad to display their wealth; never go 
elsewhere for pleasure: never buy anything foreign, 
if it can possibly be had, French. They believe a 
Frenchman, if he goes abroad to earn money, and 
dont intend to return and spend his fortune and 
himself, and live and die in France, is a rascal and 
a traitor. Keason No. 2 for being the richest peo- 
ple in the world. '■• 



18 v | 

The French have had a good land system ever 
since they guillotined their aristocracy in 1793. Great 
numbers of the agriculturists own their own farms, 
and none of them pay any rents to foreign absentee 
landlords. Eeason No. 3 for prosperity. 

France has a delightful climate and a most fer- 
tile soil, two important conditions of health, wealth 
and prosperity. It has abundant fisheries and em- 
ploys vast numbers of ships and boats and men 
and boys in developing a wealth of food from that 
quarter. France has a splendid fleet of merchant 
ships and steamers, most economically and capably 
run by the most experienced and best trained and 
educated officers of the world, and the best naviga- 
tors; far ahead of the American and English, as a 
class. France has a finely managed railway system 
and the attractions of its capital and its works of 
art and taste invite millions of tourists and travel- 
ers to come and squander there, the wealth they have 
earned elsewhere. That makes about six more 
sources of unusual wealth for France. 

AND STILL MORE. 

France has wood, coal, iron, salt, marble &c, al- 
most every product of mine, field and sea that man 
needs. They manufacture almost everything, and 
here is an enormous source of wealth; for their man- 
ufactures are the most faithful and honest, and their 
material used the best in the world — in every- 
thing but wines and liquors; their people in that 
business could no more help being frauds than 
the English and Americans and Germans engaged 
in the same debasing, defrauding, destroying busi- 
ness, m 



19 

The annual product of the silk, cotton, woolen 
and linen fabrics of France are about 640 million 
dollars and other industrial products amount to 
about 400 millions more. That is alone enough tc 
make France wealthy without any other help.v 

France exports annually about 800 million dollars* 
worth of material of which liquors are valued af 
about 45 millions. And here we can see m ost clearly 
the absurdity of claiming that any wealth is de- 
rived from her wine and brandy. 

THE VINEYARDS 

Of that country occupy about 3 %per cent of all 
the lands, just the same amount as the publio 
streets, roads, walks &c. The grape sugar product 
of this ground is converted into about 1000 million 
gallons of wine, of which about one seventh is 
made into brandy: 50 millions gallons are exported, 
valued at about 45 million dollars. The rest, 950 
million gallons, value say 25 cents a gallon or 240 
million dollars, is drank in France, and every one 
knows, that dont enrich France a particle. Not a 
whit more than burning 240 million dollars worth 
of powder would. But it pauperizes hundreds of 
thousands of people who drink it; drives them by 
thousands to jail, madhouse, poorhouse, and suicide; 
every gallon of it that any one buys and drinks is 
a dead loss to him and is no more benefit to him 
than if he poured it on the ground. 

DRUNKENNESS 

Is appallingly prevalent and alarmingly on the 
increase in the wine and all the other districts of 
France. Immediately after the war with Prussia, 
3tringent laws were enacted in France punishing 



20 
drunkenness and a heavy fine was exacted of any 
barroom or restaurant, which had not a large print- 
ed placard hung up, specifying the penalties for 
drunkenness or selling liquor to drunks and mi- 
nors. 

In the Congress of France during the debate up- 
on the enactment of that law, one of the members 
of that body declared, that in the portion of the 
French army that went to the war from his district, 
there was not a soldier who would not sit at a table 
and drink till he fell helpless under it, if he got 
the chance. ' "Mine is a district of light wines," 
said he, "gentlemen, and I challenge any of you to 
say that your soldiers were any more sober than 
ours,'' and no one disputed his asserticp. 

Perhaps it did not help to enrich France, that 
the drunkenness of her army led to their being 
soundly whipped, every time they were engaged 
with the Prussians; the latter sober because they 
were in an enemy's country and under stricter dis- 
cipline. 

Now while France exports the 45 million dollars 
worth of liquors, it is admitted there is money made 
by some of the exporters themselves, because a very 
large part of their export, all of it to North and South 
America and to most other countries — in fact about 
all the export, except a part of what goes to Eng- 
land's only potato and apple alcohol and beet syrup 
whisky and water doctored. This wine costs them 
about 10 or 15 cents a gallon and sells for fancy 
prices, and there is a profit as well as a pleasure for 
the French wine doctor in gulling the poor silly 
Tise guzzlers of Yankeedom. 



21 

This is no new thing, for there were regular pre- 
miums awarded at the Paris Expositions of 1855 
and 1867 for fabricated wines. 

A WASTE. 

But let us now, after giving every credit to this 
wine, look at the debit side. To produce this wine 
for export and also to furnish material for more 
drink required by the people of France, vast im- 
jDorts are made of potato and rice and grain whisky 
from Holland, Belgium and Germany: British spir- 
its from England; rum from the "West Indies: and 
vast quantities of native beet sugar are made into 
spirits: so that it is somewhat doubtful if France af- 
ter all, does not pay as much for her imports of 
•beer and spirits as she gets for her exported drinks. 

And a matter of much more consequence. Be- 
cause of the waste of the ground employed in rais- 
ing the grape sugar, to make this useless and pau- 
perizing drink, France has to import over 200 mil- 
lion dollars worth of grain food for her people to 
eat, and of late years the balance of trade has been 
getting more and more against France every year: 
and because she utterly wastes all this land and la- 
bor devoted to the wine and brandy business, she 
has to pay out something like 200 million dollars a 
year in cash which never comes back. There is lit- 
tle doubt that the ground thus wasted would sup- 
ply the food needed if properly used. ^ 

But for her wine, France would doubtless be in- 
comparably richer than any other nation. But any 
impartial honest observer must see that that is her 
one weak spot, a cancer that is eating out the life 
of the nation. We have only looked at the finan- 



22 
cial question so far. But if the wretched and scan- 
dalously impudent falsehoods asserted as to the en- 
riching effects of wine and brandy in France were 
true, what American would purchase national wealth 
at the price of the utter bandruptcy of American 
morals and decency ? Who covets the honor of sup- 
plying the world with harlotry and immorality and 
obscenity? Who covets to follow the example of 
one of the finest races and peoples the world has ever 
seen being transformed into a nation of libertines 
and drunkards ? and one whose population is de- 
creasing under all conditions the most favorable for 
rapid increase, save this debauchery of wine. 

And after preaching so long of the untold wealth 
that France derives from wine, the priests of Bac- 
chus lately tell us, that this year (1881) because of 
the phylloxera, it must import 100 million gallons 
of wine to drink, about double their annual ex- 
port. That is a confession that France must waste 
250 million dollars worth of her own annual harvest 
in drink; then she has to pay 50 to 75 millions 
of cash to get more drink; and after that she must 
send money abroad to purchase 200 million dollars 
worth of bread which she might have raised upon 
her own vineyard lands that go to waste. This 
is bad economy and is pauperizing France by de- 
grees. 

But there is no wine that France will ever import, 
but the cheapest kind of Italian or other trash, that 
is not fit for market until it is doctored. It must be 
a wine that only the French would buy, and at a 
price that makes it about as cheap as the French 
fabricators can make from potatoes, thistles, beets, ci- 



23 

der and molasses, which costs about 10 to 15 cents 
per gallon. The large "import of wine by France" 
is another delusion put forth by the wine sharps of 
this state to deceive the vineyard men. 

ANOTHER MONSTROUS FABRICATION 

was set afloat thru the Chronicle a few days ago to 
fool and deceive our vineyard men. It was stated 
that the transport of wine affords about one-third of 
the railway traffic of France. One-third of that 
traffic is about 20 million dollars; just enough to 
transport every gallon made in the country from 
the northermost to the southermost point of France 
and then back to where it started. But as it is 
probable not over one gallon in 20 goes any distan- 
ce by rail or goes at all from the ranch on which it 
is made, it would have to pay 40 cents a gallon 
freight to pay one-third of the railway receipts. If 
the advocates of sobriety and prosperity, who de- 
sire to see grape growing make every vineyard man 
and every one of his family wealthy and happy,, 
should assure them that a market is awaiting them 
for a millon tons of raisins every year in China at a 
dollar a pound, we would still have a larger margin 
of truth left us, than the wine and brandy sharps 
have ever presented as to that interest in other 
countries. Their impositions upon the farmers 
have been monstrous and cruel, like their business^ 
which itself is the essence of fraud and wrong and 
mockery. 



24 



NUMBER V. 



The question, does it pay or will it pay, to make 
this a wine and brandy country, is one of immense 
importance to Calif ornians, but most of all, to the 
people who raise grapes. They, above all men, 
should look this question of finance square in the 
face, without prejudice or avarice or hate; they 
should weigh the matter intelligently, calmly, wise- 
ly. At the start they should drop forever, one gross 
mistake many of them labor under, which is that 
those who object to wine making are hostile to the 
welfare of the vineyard men. Look at the matter 
fairly, and see who is most likely to tell you the 
truth and be your friend. ' The one who has no axo 
to grind, no trade to make, does not ask a cent from 
you for any purpose whatever; or the party who is 
going to levy a commission and a profit and a shave 
on the wine and brandy you are coaxed to make, and 
the grapes you are to sell at his distillery? 

Look at this matter squarely and you will see that 
two parties make each a separate x>roposition. The 
wine and brandy trader who expects to live and 
grow rich upon your toil, advises you to make wine 
and holds out the promise that a ton of your grapes 
shall be worth as much as a ton of Bodega x^otatoes, 
when there iz a big crop of the latter, say $10 to $15 
per ton. 

"We, the other party, who have not one cent of 
monied interest in the matter either way, propose to 
you to make a ton of your grapes, worth three or 
four tons of potatoes, as they really are and ought 
to be, three or four cents a pound at the vineyard. The 



25 
wine maker's offer puts you and others too in deadly 
peril; our offer promises or threatens no harm to 
anybody. Can you refuse then to listen calmly and 
intelligently to a reasonable discussion of this mat- 
ter? In the last article we were not quite done 
with 

FKANCE. 

Mr. Arpad Haraszthy tells you that you can 
always find a market in Bourdeaux for one hundred 
million gallons a year of California wine at 35 cents 
a gallon. Now if this is true, or if France would 
buy fifty million gallons even a year of our wine or 
any other wine, it forever gives the lie to the asser- 
tion made by the wine advocates, that wine and 
brandy-making, or either, is a profitable business for 
France. In the preceding number it was proved 
clearly that France owed nothing but loss and pov- 
erty to that business, but Mr Haraszthy confirms it 
when he says that France, after making 1,000 to 
1,500 million gallons of wine, has to buy an enor- 
mous quantity in addition, for the use of her own 
drunkards. 

And he supposes that to send this wine to France 
the grapes from which it is made will be sold by the 
growers at $8 per ton {half the value of potatoes) 
which he thinks will pay a return to the million- 
aire capitalists, who he very properly supposes will 
have come to own all the vineyards by the time this 
State makes 100 million gallons of wine for export. 
He is right in implying that the wine making vine- 
yards will change hands, as so many of them have 
done under mortgages and the bad management ©f 
those who use wine. 



26 

A recent article in the Chronicle (July3rl) pro- 
claims the fact too, that in the last 30 years the 
consumption of beer in France has been multiplied 
43 times: has grown to be 43 times as much as it 
used to be. The increase of strong spirits we know 
is increasing in France and has been for 50 years at 
a terribly alarming rate; and it looks as if the wine 
business, which has pauperized every country that 
ever experimented with it, is fast having the same 
effect in France. The universal drunkenness which 
has ever followed wine in all countries is even too 
much for the frugal and ever economizing French- 
man, of whom it used to be said that 39 out of 40 
were always hoarding a portion of their earnings, 
against one in five of the English. 

About two years ago the wine advocates gave the 
following as the wine production of the world : 

Countries. Gallons. 

France 1,505,000,000 

Spain 528,000,000 

Portugal 130,750,000 

Italy 810,650,000 

Austro-Hungary 57,300,000 

Germany 156,900,000 

Switzerland 10,460,000 

Russia and Turkey 52,300,000 

Greece and Cypress 26,150,000 

Eoumania . /: 15,690,000 

Total 3,806,200,000 

Please look at it and decide if you please, which 

of those old wine producing countries you would 

desire California to resemble or copy, and in what 

respect if any. 

Take from these countries the good and sober ele- 



27 

ment that exists in France and Germany, and then 
the sober State of Maine, or the sober and christian 
portion of Massachusetts, or the grand State of Kan- 
sas, three States but a few days old in comparison 
with those countries — and the people of any one of 
them are of more importance to the world and ex- 
ert a greater influence for good upon it and will con- 
tinue to do so, than the whole of the others united. 
One vigorous young State of sober Christian Amer- 
ican civilization is worth more than a dozen of 
these wine debauched, wine pauperized, wine be- 
nighted and wine brutalized nations. 

And California has a future of wealth and power 
within her grasp, which can only be attained by a 
careful avoidance of the manifest pauperizing and 
barbarizing agencies to which is mainly due the 
present abject degraded condition of the miserable, 
despicable bankrupted and decayed nations who have 
prostituted their vineyards into a scathing curse to 
mankind. 

GBAPES. 

State aid and private aid, much individual enter- 
prise and effort have been employed in origina- 
ting and developing a wine and brandy system — 
under the mistaken idea that it was to become a 
paying business. But not a particle of effort, com- 
paratively speaking, has ever been made to develop 
the grape business, the real business of the grape 
grower; the business God planned for us and gave 
us. Wine making is simply and only using the 
sugar in the grape, which can be had just as good 
and as useful and as cheap in the sugar cane, the 
cactus and the potato. 



28 

No society has ever attempted to create a market 
or instigate a supply or develop a trade in canned 
grapes, in fresh pure wholesome grape juice, in 
grape jelly. Almost no energy has been put forth 
to stimulate a production of raisins and to secure a 
demand for our raisins and increase and advertize 
their excellence. 

Not one intelligent effort has been made to secure 
a transport at honest figures for fresh grape3 to the 
East, where there is a market for at least 1000 tons 
of fresh California grapes every day at 8 to 10 cents 
a pound, which ought to be divided in this way: 
freight 2% cents; Eastern commission and expenses 
2% cents, and to the grape growers here, delivered 
at the cars, 3 cents per pound or more, 
v No effort has been made to abate the monstrous 
extortion of 6 or 7 cents a pound charged by the 
railroad companies where 2 cents would be an ex- 
cessive rate to satisfy the most grasping monopo- 
list on the Eastern side of the mountains. Not a 
protest has been made against the charge of seven 
cents freight on a pound of grapes which yields the 
grower one cent. 



CALIEOKNIA VITICULTUEE. 



The Commissioners appointed to supervise the 
drunkard factories and drunkard making interest of 
the state, have published their report, which states 



29 _ 

that the vintage of ''temperance material" in 1880 
was from 10 to 12 million gallons, thus — 

9,500,000 gallons Dry wines . . at 25 cents. 
700,000 gallons Sweet "Wine . . at 60 cents. 
490,000 gallons brandy . . . at $1.15 
Which foots up to $3,312,500. 
They also estimate the raisins at $100,000 and 
table grapes sold at $150,000. 

Shipments from the State in 1880 were 2,487,353 
gallons wine and 189,098 gallons brandy. Estimat- 
ing these exports at the rates given above we have, 

Value of wine exported $ 684,775 

Value of wine for home consumption . . 2,110,225 
Value of brandy exported . . . . . 217,462 
Value of brandy used as home temper- 
ance drink 300,038 



$3,312,500 
And we are treated thus to the information that to 
export $902,837 worth of drunkenness, we have to 
tax our own people to consume $2,410,263 worth of 
the same thing here, which is not only utterly use- 
less, but which destroys the lives and properties of 
the people of the State, tills the country with mur- 
der, suicide, crime, divorce, debauchery and in- 
sanity, and is naturally and logically and inevitably 
the most pauperizing, demoralizing and destructive 
agency that ever cursed a country. 

The Chronicle, reviewing the report, says: "Viti- 
culture properly studied and managed, is within 20 
years to become the leading industry of California, 
yielding a larger net revenue to cultivators than all 
other industries confined to the soil together." 



30 

This is quite possible for Viticulture; but it will 
be found an excellent policy for Viticulturists to 
plant such vines as will be most available, when in 
a very few years, the laws of the United States will 
make poison- wine and poison-brandy culture a 
criminal offence. And whenever that time comes 
the wealth and prosperity and peace and safety of 
the vine cultivator will be increased ten fold in the 
aggregate, and viticulture will be one of the happi- 
est, most respectable and most profitable of accu- 
pations ever known. 

The festive phylloxera is an inconvenient pest of 
the grape farmer, but it dont in the least incommode 
the wine maker. Altho it is said to have destroyed 
a million and a half of acres of vineyard in France, 
it has not reduced the volume of wine and brandy 
produced by one pint. As long as potatoes and 
rice and grain and beets and apples and molasses 
and sugar scrapings hold out all over France, Ger- 
many, Belgium, etc., they can produce any amount 
of precisely the same material as that from the 
rotted grape; the flavor only is a fabrication; the 
same water, the same alcohol from the same putrified 
sugar, the same sugar of lead and the same blue 
stone and drugs; and producing the same drunken- 
ness and brutality. 

In short, the fabrication of wine and brandy that 
sells for $5 and $10 and $20 a gallon, made from 
potatoes, thistles, cabbage, kitchen slops, swill- 
tubs, old boots and rags, drugs, etc., is rather to be 
commended for using a substitute and saving the 
wholesome grape for some useful purpose. 



31 



NUMBER VI. 
GLUCOSE. A DISCOVERT ! ! ! 

The Santa Rosa Republican of Aug 4th 1881 has 
the following. 

'Tt has leaked out that some dishonorable wine 
manufacturers in Napa Valley have imported 
Glucose for the purpose of adulterating wines. The 
Calistogian says: 

"It is to be regretted that there are manufac- 
turers of wine who are so grasping that they are 
not satisfied with the large profits already obtain- 
able from pursuing their business in a legitimate 
manner — that there are men who will not hesiitate 
to greatly injure an important business in this sec- 
tion of country, now being so prominently brought 
before the world, such prominence being due more 
to the purity of our wines than anything else." 

The St Helena Vinicultural Society met and dis- 
cussed the fraudulent undertaking, and denounced 
in a series of resolutions that mean business. 
One reads: 

Resolved — That we, the St. Helena Vinicultural 
Association, condemn in the strongest terms any at- 
tempt by any party to adulterate our wine and 
brandy by the addition of any substance of what- 
ever kind, and more particularly by the use of 
glucose, and that we will expose all parties import- 
ing or receiving the same, by rjublishing their 
names in the papers of this and the Eastern States, 
and that all wine dealers purchasing wine or brand- 
ies from winemakers using glucose shall also be 
published in like manner, etc." q 

_^Now what is Glucose ? some horrible, poisonous, 
villainous compound ? Not at all. It is simply 
grape sugar, precisely the kind of sugar found in 



32 

grapes, figs and various sweet fruits. It is the only 
material in all those fruits that is of any use in the 
manufacture of wine or brandy: the pure water of 
the juice of course excepted. Most of the other 
varieties of sugar can be easily changed into Glu - 
cose; it exists naturally also in milk and eggs, and 
largely in honey. It can be chemically produced 
by the ton from starch and gum and other vegeta- 
ble matters. Starch boiled in water that contains 
one per cent of sulphuric acid is in a very short 
time converted into glucose or grape sugar and 
only requires cleansing to be just the same. Dias- 
tase may be used also to convert starch into glu- 
cose: starch is an important -per cent of the sub- 
stance of potato, wheat, beans; various vegetables 
and all the cereals. Glucose may be made too 
from rags and some other materials when treated 
with sulphuric acid. 

J) NO ADULTERATION. 

It does not seem proper to call the use of glucose, 
in the manufacture of wine or brandy, an adulter- 
ation, for it is exactly the material from which 
grape wine is made. One man gets his glucose 
from rice, milk, honey, corn or potatoes; ferments 
it in water and produces alcohol and water, and a 
I! ttle flavoring extract being added, he has wine. 
The other man in Napa Valley subjects his grapes 
to exactly the same process of rotten putref action, 
which the decomposed body of a dead dog or cat 
has undergone when it is in its most intensely of- 
fensive and poisonous condition. The starch and 
nutriment and sugar and every good wholesome 
decent property of the grape, except the water, has 



33 

been destroyed. Putrefaction has taken the glu- 
cose to pieces, separated its elements and put them 
together in a new form, in which they have become 
alcohols That with the water and a grape flavor is 
wine. Sugar, starch, gum, alcohol, and vinegar are 
composed of exactly the same elements, but in 
slightly varying proportions, and from starch or 
gum all the rest can be made, but no alcoholic 
liquor can be produced in any other manner than 
by the putrefaction of glucose; and glucose is always 
itself and the same, no matter how it is procured. 

COMPETITION. 

A great outcry is made by many persons and by 
some temperance people too against adulteration 
of liquors. Poisoning them with lead, strychnine 
or vitriol is perhaps a little more wicked than poi- 
soning them with alcohol. But the use of glucose 
is only a competition of the potato and wheat- 
grower with the vineyard men, and if the latter 
will look at this matter rationally and practically, 
they will see that at the start they are wofully 
beaten and will be worse so every year. 

The men who are importing glucose into Napa 
Valley are proving that it is cheaper, imported 
here, than grape sugar is raised in Napa Valley. If 
that is so, how is it in England, Germany &c, but 
more especially in the States east ol the Rocky 
Mountains, where it is manufactured at a trifling 
cost compared with its cost here. "Will they ever 
buy a dollars worth of grape glucose from Napa 
Valley and £>ay freight on it, when they can pro- 
duce at probably one third the price a precisely 
similar article in their own cellars. 



34 

For many years one has seen "California Wine 
Depot" on the doors and windows and signs of cel- 
lars and stores and shops in any of the towns and 
cities all the way from the Missouri river to the 
shores of the Atlantic. Is there a single grape 
grower in California who is weak enough to believe 
that the wholesalers who have been for years sup- 
plying these honest Depots, have ever been silly 
enough to sell them a gallon of wine made in a Cal- 
ifornia vineyard , when that would have cost them 
probably fifty cents or more a gallon, while they 
could make with their own glucose and "fixins" a 
superior article right on the spot<at about 15 cents a 
gallon; possessing all the qualities' of the genuine, 
just as good and as wholesome and so like, that the 
Calif or nian himself, after turning round twice 
could not tell which of the two was his own. 

The grape growers of California are never go- 
ing to believe that the men who put up wineries 
and distilleries, are going to have the least regard 
for anything but their own pockets. No one will 
pretend that liquor dealers and makers can ever 
have the faintest scruples as to the manner in which 
they make money. They ought to know that every 
report made by them to our vineyard men about 
the prosperity of wine making countries and the 
condition of the wine making peasantry therein, 
has been utterly deceptive: they ought to know 
that these wineries ai.d brandy makers hope to en- 
rich themselves at the expense of the ruin of the 
properties and bodies and souls of the vineyard 
men: that they openly talk of peopling this State 
with a class of foreigners whose only recommenda- 



35 ' 

tion is that they swill a swinish quantity of poison- 
ous drink, which qualifies them to be stupid slaves 
of the winery monopolist: that Chinese labor is to 
do the vineyard and winery work and let the Ameri- 
can children grow up hoodlums. 

All this you grape growers know, and now when 
every kind of the best wine and brandy can not on- 
ly be fabricated in the cellars of San Francisco, 
but can be made of the same quality in every re- 
spect from glucose &c, at about 15 cents or possibly 
20 cents a gallon at the outside, do you suppose 
these saintly dealers in drunkenness are going to 
forfeit their chances of making the most they can 
out of the folly of their customers, for the sake of 
making your business profitable? 

The competition is too much altogether for our 
folks to stand. In France, Holland, Belgium, Ger- 
many, England, Jersey, Guernsey, Canada, and all 
the States east of Kansas, in San Francisco, 
Stockton, Napa, Sacramento, in every one of these 
places they can make your wine and your brandy 
out of cheaper material than you can raise from the 
grape, and at prices that (if that was your 
only resource) would soon put you in the same con- 
dition of beggary and serfdom and brutishness that 
prevails among the winemaking populations of Eu- 
rope, where a peasant's wages are at the highest 20 
cents a day, one half payable in wine that has to him 
no value whatever. 

But there is not the least necessity for the grape 
growers of California to become the plundered vic- 
tims of their would be masters. With their ener- 
gies directed aright, the grape devoted to its legiti- 



36 

mate honest uses, there is such a prospective 
wealth in the vineyards of California,^ as never 
came to any agricultural system in the history of 
the world. The grape used for wine purposes has 
never profited anybody except an occasional "bleat- 
ed capitalist :" it has blasted millions after millions. 
But the grape always had and has now all the qualities 
to make it the most enriching as it is the most benefi- 
cent and precious of all the food gifts of the Crea- 
tor to man. 

As a parallel to the glucose fraud, for it is a fraud 
when its product is sold for more than 20 or 25 
cents a gallon, the following is cut from the Wine 
Dealers Gazette of July 1881. 

THB . WHISKY IN PARIS. 

"We hope we are not intruding upon or into the 

privacies of domestic life when we note the fact 

that the agent of the bonanza king, called on 

Messrs & Co., the agents of the — 

whisky and ordered shipped to Paris, one barrel and 

ten cases of the "private stock," brand, and at 

prices that seem almost fabulous. 

"No pent up Utica contracts our powers 
Tor the whole boundless continent is ours," 

Thus it seems that Americans visiting Europe are 
spreading the glad tidings of the superior quality 
of the whisky in foreign lands." 

Now everyone who is posted on the subject knows 
that that "private stock" of "fancy brand" and 
"fabulous prices" is nothing more than common al- 
cohol and water which costs per gallon, duty (per- 
haps) 90 cents— the alcohol itself 20 cents, flavoring 
extracts 2 cents. And nothing else in the world 



37 
can be done to it to make it more valuable except 
to keep it a little while; and every appearance of 
age can be given it in 48 hours by a smart doctor. 
No doubt the millionaire of fabulous price and the 
Patrick Pianagan who wants the "cheapest and the 
wan that has the besht grip in it" have their wants 
supplied thru the same faucet and there are instan- 
ces reported of a private stock of a "half barrel" of 
prime stuff just for our particular private friends, 
which has sent forth a continuous stream for the 
last 20 years and there are no symptons of it getting 
dry yet. 

But the fancy prices for first quality whisky, 
brandy, and California wine dont go past the whole- 
salers who have cellars and buy glucose. But the 
wine grape growers will have to be satisfied to get $10 
a ton for their grapes and rejoice at the luck of the 
people who get fabulous prices for the produce of 
their down cellar glucose vineyard. 

Next thing to consider is how to make the grape 
profitable. 



NUMBER VII. 

There is one charge which can never be truth- 
fully made against the advocates of temperance, 
They have never been known to destroy any man's 
business without making a better, more honorable 
and more profitable one open up before him. The 
destruction of the business of every individual 
who sold or made liquor in Maine or Kansas, made 
a better business possible for four or five men in 
place of it. And any one of those new possibili- 
ties was open to the saloonkeeper who wanted to re- 
form and embrace an honorable means of liveli- 
hood. 

It is so with the argument against wine and 
brandy making: we warn the vineyard men against 
making themselves helpless slaves of the glucose 
wineries and distilleries; against wasting their 
grapes for $10 a ton as they will soon have to, if 
no resource is open to them but the wine vat: 
but all the damage and wrong we propose to do 
them is to point them to $50 or $60 or more a ton. 
and that too, in a business as reputable and hon- 
orable and happy and healthful and pleasant as the 
world can show elsewhere. 

But to do this requires something more than 
paper talk, or expressions of opinion. A very 
great activity has been put forth in the past by a 
few interested individuals who were anxious to 
rope in the vineyard men to raise wine grapes, to 
enrich the big wineries and distilleries and glucose 



39 

dealers, at the expense of the pauperization and 
rain and damnation of the vinegrowers who could 
be induced to become their dupes. A similar acti- 
vity exercised by the vinegrowers in a legitimate 
direction will produce beneficent results, in place 
of the disasters planned by the speculating opera- 
tors who have engineered the Viniculturist 
schemes. 

the c. P. R. R. 

"We hear of California pears and peaches selling 
in the East at such fabulous prices as indicate that 
the great bulk of the people there , are prohibited 
from ever purchasing more than a rare taste of them. 
A few years ago the people of Vineland were com- 
plaining bitterly that they could not at times get 
over five cents a pound for their grapes, during the 
most plenteous state of the market and they were 
afraid it would get worse. At the same time peo- 
ple here were selling them at $8 to $15 a ton for 
wine. 

If there were only a half dozen carloads a month 
or year, the E. E. Co, would be justified in charg- 
ing an extra freight for the extra trouble incurred 
in their management. But when they can afford to 
bring certain classes of freight from New York to 
San Francisco at $25 per ton — when they talk of 
carrying the wheat crop of this State to Galveston 
and Liverpool for something like $15 a ton, when 
we know that freight is customarily $3 a ton from 
Chicago to New York, nearly one third the distance 

from here to New^ York, we know that the E. E. 

Co can make large money by carrying^ 1000 tons 
of grapes and other fruit a day at 2 or 2% cents a 



40 

pound quick freight, and that there would be a 
ready sale for that amount every day at prices 
which would leave 3 or 4 cents a pound to our grape 
and fruit growers and for choice qualities much 
more. 

It is of no advantage to the Cailf ornia fruit grow- 
er to know that 3 Cal. peaches or pears sell for 25 
cents in New York, for all it amounts to is, that 
the railroad millionaires have made a net profit of 
nearly $1,000 a car load, the speculator who took 
the risk has made $200 or $300 if he had good luck 
in preserving his fruit, and one or two fruit 
growers have got a cent or two a XDOund for small 
lots, in place of 500 of them selling one or two 
tons apiece at good rates every morning of the 
season. 

Of course the railroad managers would much 
prefer to carry 100 tons of merchandise in a given 
time for $20,000 net profit, than to carry 500 tons 
in the same time for the same amount of net pro- 
fit, even if at the latter rate they were realizing a 
return of 25 per cent a year upon their capital. It 
is less trouble for them and they consult the in- 
terest of no one else. A reduction in freight upon 
grapes may foreshadow to them a general reduction 
upon other merchandize, therefore they are not 
likely to propose it 

In a very short time, were any reasonable rate of 
freight offered for fruit hence to the East, we 
should doubtless arrive at a method of packing 
and preparing it, so as to insure its arrival in prime 
condition always: in that case the demand for our 
grapes in the Eastern market would for a long 



41 

aeries of years, keep ahead of our capacity to sup- 
ply, and thus highly remunerative prices would be 
maintained. 

An important consideration just here is that 
our fruit sent East will never in the least reduce 
the capacity of our customers there to purchase 
from us next year and for twenty or fifty years to 
come. On the contrary the generous use of our 
wholesome fruit will be an assurance of their con- 
tinued health and ability to continue good, paying 
customers. Not so with the brandy and wine; a 
largo proportion of our present customers or rather 
consumers of these things, will in a short time be 
in the poor house, in the gutter, in the penitentiary 
and our future sales must depend upon the ensnar- 
ing of fresh victims to their ruin. , There is no de- 
nial that can be truthfully made to this: but we do 
not deny either that some of the customers and 
consumers of wine and brandy and some of the 
makers too, will get along pretty soberly, live to a 
good age and maintain a well deserved reputation 
thruout for being good hearted, generous, kindly, 
honest, obliging characters. First rate fellows in 
every thing but one: one fault or misfortune they 
certainly have in the matter of drink. 

MORE EAILROADS, 

A business of transportation which would im- 
prove very largely the annual revenues and the ac- 
tual capital value of every farm and property of 
this State is of many million times the importance 
that the gabble about greenbacks and the coopera- 
tion of drunken working men, and the Chinese and 
communist questions are, all of which could be settled 



42 

by the instant prosperity that a prohibitory law 
would give us. And a railroad project that would 
reduce to one third of their present amount the 
fares and freights paid by the people of the State 
and thus enormously increase the business and 
wealth of the people, is a subject well worthy of 
the most elaborate consideration and discussion. 

/Evidently the easiest and best solution of all the 
complicated questions, between the railroads and 
the people would be the building by our general 
government of a trunk line from Atlantic to 
Pacific. We should never want any other re- 
gulation of freights and fares, nor any more rail- 
ioad commissions paid by the people to sell out 
the people. There can never be a valid objection 
offered to such a project, that does not apply with 
equal force to a government postal service, which 
is an inestimable public advantage and has no ob- 
jectionable drawbacks. 

Our farmers and fruitraisers and our citizenship 
should actively set this project in motion with a 
determination to win. And in the meantime every 
aid and encouragement should be tendered by the 
State to the pushing of rival lines from Eastern con- 
nections to the Pacific. These would help to break 
down the present enslaving and grinding monopoly, 
which not only exacts such a merciless tribute 
from the industries of the State, but which not- 
withstanding many advantages afforded by it, has 
kept in force a stringent tyrannical ukase which 
paralyzes a vast agricultural interest with a 7 cent 
freight on a 1 cent product. The freight of a ton 
of paper worth $220 here is $25 from New York. 



43 

The freight of 1 ton of grapes worth here $20 to 
§25 is $140 to New York. 

The most important financial question that ever 
came before the frnit raisers of the State is, how 
can we get onr product shipped to the East and be 
permitted to participate in the profits of its sale. 



NUMBER VIII. 

It has been heretofore stated in these articles, 
that the vine growers have been purposely misled 
by parties interested in deceiving them. Some of 
these have had grape lands to sell, and have clothed 
a ruinous, pauperizing, despicable, drunkard breed- 
ing interest in a stolen garment of gold and purple, 
to defraud ignorant men into paying fabulous prices 
for the lands they wished to get off their hands or 
to sell for others at a round commission. Others 
have had grape cuttings in great variety to sell and 
have sought to induce innocent cultivators to plant 
the worthless kinds that are suitable only for wine, 
and will not make raisins. Then winery owners de- 
sire that large crops of grapes shall be at their mer- 
cy at $8 or $10 a ton, as they soon will be, w T hen of 
no use but for wine. And then the wine and bran- 
dy merchants want to buy their wine at 15 or 20 
cents and sell it for 50 cents or a dollar. All who 
advise the pushing of the wine business, are going 
to sell something, or make something out of the 
vine growers, and have a private money making 
reason of their own for urging the falsehood that it 
is a profitable business, whereas, they know it has 
debauched and pauperized and unmanned everv peo- 



44 

pie that have ever engaged in it since the time of 
Noah. 

And now let lis listen to the admissions of a wine 
expert who has a very strong interest in promoting 
the manufacture of wine for him to sell. Mr. A. 
Harazsthy compares the extravagant results paraded 
by the owners of large tracts of grape lands before 
the eyes of cultivators, wilh the practice of salting 
mines to he]p their sale. He says any one planting 
a vineyard and expecting more than $30 or $40 an 
acre from it, will be disappointed and anything over 
$40 ought to be considered a golden harvest. The 
Rescue has often declared that grapes for wine would 
be sold at $10 or $12 a ton at soon as the furor of 
1880 has subsided. Mr. Harazsthy says that in five 
years they will go down to $7 or $8 a ton, and the 
cask may cost more than the wine is worth, as it has 
been in France owing to the large production. But 
he still says we can always find a market for wines in 
Bordeaux at 35 cts a gallon delivered there. And he 
expects that in our southern states a splendid market 
will be always found for California wines. 

The fact that France raises 1000 to 1500 million 
gallons of wine a year, and exports about 50 mil- 
lion gallons and drinks all the rest, and after that 
enormous waste of land and labor and capital, is now 
purchasing vineyards in Hungary* Germany and 
Italy, and buying up spirits made from potatoes, 
beets, turnips, glucose and sugar, in Germany, 
Belgium and Holland, and oceans of beer and gin 
from England, with which to fabricate wines and 
brandies and absinth, to supply the inordinate crav- 
ings of her many millions of insatiable drunkards 



45 

during the few years of short grape harvests, and is 
ready to buy 100 million gallons of wine a year 
from California — ought to be a full and complete 
answer for ever, to the monstrously and manifestly 
absurd proposition that wine and brandy making 
could ever be profitable b> the country or people 
that engage in it. 

Mr. Harazsthy says very truly that Eastern deal- 
ers will only buy the cheapest wine from us, and 
will only buy cheap while they are selling dear. 
Therein lies an immensely important fact to the 
vine grower; any Eastern wine dealer who knows 
the business, can buy the very cheapest wines that 
are made in the state at the lowest price, and out of 
that same cask he can sell in three days after, the 
very finest quality of wine produced anywhere, that 
the producer cannot tell from his own. And with- 
out having added more than a cent or two a gallon 
to its cost, he sells it at the top fancy price. Those 
who do not know that fact are blind. 

And there is one very imposing future obstacle to 
the wine interest, but it will be the greatest blessing 
which could come to the vinegrowers; in a very 
few years, altho now they pretend to ignore it, 
the sale of any of the poisons manufactured from 
the rotted, prostituted grape will be a serious 
criminal offence all over this Union and the civil- 
ized world. 

This subject has been treated altogether from 
the financial or commercial standpoint. Nothing 
has been said at all of the hideous criminality of 
turning this beautiful state into a shambles of drunk- 
enness, vice, violence and unlimited debauchery. 



46 
NUMBER IX. 

Adulteration ot Wine. [1883] 

Interesting revelations of fraud in making French 
wines have recently startled the public and the 
drinkers, altho the trade and the temperance experts 
have known for 30 years that every kind of alcoholic 
liquor, from the highest to the cheapest, is cheaply 
counterfeited and fraud is the general rule every- 
where. t 

The municipal authorities of Paris recently anal- 
ized 3,361 samples of French wine. Only 387 were 
pronounced good, 1063 passable, and 1,911 were de- 
clared bad. And this was done by experts favor- 
ably interested toward the wine trade of their 
country. A Paris correspondent of the Chronicle 
(J. H. H.) writes that France produced from 1868 
to 1878 an average of 1,320 million gallons of wine, 
but since then only an average of 550 millions, be- 
cause of the phyloxera. 

But there has been all along as much used in 
France and as much exported as ever. In 1881 
France imported 176 million, made 132 million from 
raisins and press refuse, and 264 million gallons more 
from all sorts of substitutes, the latter flavored often 
with poisonous ingredients, beside the alcohol in it. 

The dealers of San Francisco import cases, 
bottles, corks and labels from France, and sell the 
wine they put in them as French. No harm done 
beyond the falsehood of the label. One is as good 
and will make drunk as well as the other, and the 
.poor silly buyers who think it high-toned and 
European to drink the trash, can only judge of the 
quality by the price. 

It is most important to our vineyard men to re- 
member that the French, English and all others 
who deal in alcoholic drinks always can and do 
make imitations cheaper than the genuine. So if 
any quality of Oal. wine should ever bring a fancy 



47 

price, the city cellar vineyard will make it and rake 
in the profits — not the grape growers. And the 
cheap fraud made from glucose, potatoes and pulque- 
cactus is just as good as the genuine. 

HOW IT PAYS FRANCE. 

After centuries of wine growing, and the world 
for a market, a short crop compels France to expend 
an enormous sum to satisfy the depraved appetites 
of her people with imported and fabricated poisons, 
that would be vastly more profitable to the nation 
if they were all poured out into the sea; or if the 
money, time and labor had been employed in mak- 
ing and burning firecrackers. 

Let us figure up the wine account of France. 

Cost of 550,000,000 gals, genuine wine produced at 15c. . .$82,500,000 

" "176,000,000 " imported wine at 15c 26,400,000 

" "132,000,000 " made from refuse and raisins at 10c 13,200,000 
«■ "264,000,000 " imitationwineatlOc. 26,400,000 

1,122,000,000 $148,500,000 

deduct 50,000,000 " exported, say at 90c 45,000,000 

Money, time and labor wasted $103,500,000 

Add to this the value of the imported bread which 
might have been raised on the grape lands, 7,000,000 
acres 120,000,000 

Annual money loss by wine $223,500,000 

To this vast waste in a thing utterly useless, we 
might add 500 million dollars a year more, for the 
damage to the nation in idleness, vice and crime 
caused by wine; a very low estimate. It does not 
matter if these statistics are inexact; if they are 25 
or 50 per cent, too high or too low, the fact remains 
that the business is an enormous pauperizer. Throw 
off 100 or even 200 of the 223 millions and it is still 
ruinous. Imagine for fancy's sake that the 223 
millions were money profit, that would not begin to 
compensate the misery, madness, crime and ruin 
made by the infernal curse of poison wine. 

CONCLUSION. 

Temperance men have never tried to hurt a man's 
business without giving him a choice of at least five 



48J 

better ones which would be open to him if the 
drunkard and pauper making industry were abol- 
ished. We now earnestly warn our grape growers 
to guard in time, against the coming evil day when 
their wine grapes at $8 and $10 a ton, will throw 
their lands and homes into the hands of the big 
winery monopolist and counterfeiter, who will in 
time gobble up all his small neighbors. We warn 
them against the 1,000 to 10,000 acre vineyards, 
with no church, no school, no homes but a few 
rickety slave huts, occupied by Mexican, Chinese or 
Indian savages. 

\ We point them to a brighter picture of the future 
which we ask them to paint for themselves. 

When in the near future a carload of fresh grapes 
shall be carried to the East and North for $120 to 
$160 or $15 or $20 a ton freight as they surely will, 
this State will find a rekdy paying market for 1,000, 
2,000 even 3,000 tons of luscious table grapes to go 
East every morning, if they ran produce them; and 
the demand for raisins and canned fruit and prob- 
ably fresh grape juiee prepared in wholesome wine, 
can never be supplied. Thus we shall distribute a 
daily nourishing wholesome blessing among our 
brethren all over the continent, and at the same 
time reap for ourselves a seven fold profit over any 
result possible from wine. How infinitely better 
than to send abroad a blasting curse to turn our 
country into a den of sin, barbarism, misery and 
ruin, like the pauper wine countries of the old 
world. 

Our picture of the future puts on every 1,000 
acres of vineyard 50 to 100 happy American homes 
of virtuous, well-paid industry, nurseries of intelli- 
gent worthy citizenship, with churches, schools 
and every requisite of the noblest civilization. 
That is the way we desire to harm the grape growing 
business. This is too good a country to be turner 1 
into a nursery of pauperism and vice. 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



029 827 245 



